FBI dad installs spyware on son's laptop, catches pedophile school principal

 http://www.examiner.com/article/fbi-dad-installs-spyware-on-son-s-laptop-catches-pedophile-school-principal

Have you installed WebWatcher, or any other monitoring software on your kid's laptop or computer, to make sure they're not surfing where they shouldn't? Perhaps you should, not necessarily for your child, but for his school principal, instead.

The incident, detailed on Friday, cost an FBI agent a longtime family friend.

Joseph Auther is an FBI special agent who had been stationed in the Northern Marianas Islands. He installed eBlaster, a spyware program on his 12-year-old son’s school laptop, hoping to keep abreast on his son’s Internet activity and head off any questionable usage. The laptop was provided to his son by
Whispering Palms School in Saipan in the U.S. territory of the Marianas.

eBlaster updates the "administrator" updates via email every time the person using the computer sends or receives email or chat messages; it also records every keystroke and every website visited as well as every search the user performs.

None of this, so far, would seem to involve anyone but Auther's son. However, months after installing eBlaster, Auther was transferred to the FBI’s Denver office. Before returning his son’s laptop to the school, he took it to two different service centers to have the hard drive wiped and the spyware
disabled.

However, spyware of this sort is difficult to remove. It's unclear why formatting the hard drive would not have removed the software, but apparently it did not. After turning in the laptop and before Auther and his family left for Colorado, he began to get activity notifications again.

The report Auther received showed Web searches for child pornography as well as visits to sexually explicit websites, including some that featured young Asian girls having sex with older men.

At this point, Auther should have turned the evidence over to the FBI and let them do an official investigation, but since the data was coming from a computer his son had once possessed, his curiosity overcame him. Still believing he was invested as a parent and not an FBI agent, he did some digging on his own.

The principal at Whispering Palms was a family friend, 67-year-old Thomas Weindl. Calling Weindl, Auther purported to want to buy the laptop. Auther had some reason to be concerned about his friend: earlier, Weindl had married a Korean woman with an 11-year-old daughter.

However, Weindl told Auther that he’d turned the machine over to Public School System (PSS), an organization that provides federally-funded laptops to students at public and private schools, and lets them keep them if they graduate. Flashing his badge at the PSS, Auther discovered the PSS had no record of the laptop being returned.

Another conversation with Weindl ended with the principal telling the FBI agent that "some hanky panky" was going on at PSS, but Auther believed PSS when it told him the laptop had not been returned. Finally, Auther shared his findings with another FBI agent and opened an official investigation.

Weindl was arrested and charged with “receiving child porn and with accessing child porn with an intent to view it.” While admitting the crime, he claimed he had “destroyed the [laptop] and threw the pieces in the jungle.”

Weindl lost his job at Whispering Palms; he has since been trying to fight the charges against him.
Weindl called foul on an FBI agent putting spyware on the laptop without any kind of legal authorization; i.e., a court order. However, the court has not been kind to Weindl, concluding that the software installation was not done by an FBI agent, but by a father.
Judge Ramona Manglona said:

Auther’s installation of eBlaster on the laptop in June 2011 was unrelated to the performance of his duties as an FBI special agent. Auther was acting as a devoted father, not a law enforcement officer. The intrusive conduct -- the installation of eBlaster -- was not by the government but by Auther the private citizen.

Additionally, was doing his illicit surfing and procurement on a computer not his own; therefore he was not to be granted any reasonable expectation of privacy on the laptop.
Manglona added:

Sometimes, people delude themselves into thinking that they have a right to things that don’t belong to them. A person cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a computer he stole or obtained by fraud.

It is true, the judge added, that had the laptop been assigned to Weindl, he would have had a higher expectation of privacy.

• Lesson learned: don't surf for child porn of the computer does not belong to you.
• Lesson learned: don't surf for child porn period.
• Lesson learned: don't trust some shop to remove sensitive information from your hard drive. There's no way eBlaster would have survived a hard drive formatting. We would normally, in fact, not just format the drive but then perform multiple wipes with a program that overwrites all the sectors.

Mainstream media now openly admits the FBI and CIA are reading all your emails

 http://www.naturalnews.com/038020_FBI_surveillance_emails.html#ixzz2CbpoE46Y

(NaturalNews) For years, those of us who have tried to warn the American public that Big Brother monitors all Internet users were demonized, vilified and ridiculed.

Now, the mainstream media has proven us correct.

"The U.S. government -- and likely your own government, for that matter -- is either watching your online activity every minute of the day through automated methods and non-human eavesdropping techniques, or has the ability to dip in as and when it deems necessary -- sometimes with a warrant, sometimes without," ZDNet reported earlier this month. "That tin-foil hat really isn't going to help. Take it off, you look silly."

The Petraeus case

Where's the proof that the government has this capability?

You might recall a fellow by the name of (retired) Gen. David Petraeus. He's been in the news lately.

This four-star general-turned-CIA chief just resigned his post after news broke that he had engaged in an extra-marital affair with is biographer, herself a West Point graduate and former Army officer.

What led to this shocking discovery was Petraeus' use, of all things, Google's online email service, Gmail.

According to federal law, mind you, authorities are not legally permitted to electronically snoop around in your email box.

"The government can't just wander through your emails just because they'd like to know what you're thinking or doing," Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Homeland Security Department who's now in private law practice, told The Associated Press. "But if the government is investigating a crime, it has a lot of authority to review people's emails."

Or, in the case of the CIA, if the agency wants to track a suspect ostensibly for "national security" purposes. Ditto the NSA.

The wrangling of Petraeus' email account has certainly landed him in a world of trouble, but his story has also, once again, ignited a new the debate over when, how and why governments and law enforcement agencies alike are able to access the email accounts of ordinary citizens - even if they head up the most powerful spy agency in the world.

Granted, experts say "the little people" needn't worry much about having their online presence tracked. Agencies like the CIA generally tend to have bigger fish to fry, so to speak. But nevertheless, the technology to pilfer email accounts at will obviously exists.

"Forget ECHELON, or signals intelligence, or the interception of communications by black boxes installed covertly in data centers," writes Zack Whittaker for ZDNet. "Intelligence agencies and law enforcement bodies can access - thanks to the shift towards Web-based email services in the cloud - but it's not as exciting or as Jack Bauer-esque as one may think or hope for."

(Editor's Note: ECHELON, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is the name of "a global Communications Interception (COMINT) system created by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to routinely and indiscriminately monitor and record all forms of electronic communications worldwide (both military and civilian) and overseen by the National Security Agency," according to one published description of the program.)

How the top CIA official got busted

When he set up his private Gmail account, Petraeus used a pseudonym and composed email messages but never sent them. They were instead saved as drafts. His lover, Paula Broadwell, would then log in under the same account, read the drafts then reply to them in the same manner - as a draft, without actually sending the message.

The exchanges would not be sent across the networks through Google's data centers, which would make it nearly impossible for the NSA or any other ELINT (electronic intelligence) agency (like Britain's GCHQ or the Israeli Mossad) to "read" the messages while they are in transit between accounts.

Other sinister operators - terrorists, pedophiles and the like - have been known to use the same trick to avoid detection, ZDNet reported.

"But surely IP addresses are logged and noted? When emails are sent and received, yes. But the emails were saved in draft and therefore were not sent. However, Google may still have a record of the IP addresses of those who logged into the account," the report said.

In the end, the FBI used a little-know law called the Stored Communications Act, which is part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, as the basis for getting a warrant to view Petraeus' private Gmail account. And that's how agents found the stored messages that were never actually sent.

"Once it knew Ms. Broadwell was the sender of the threatening messages, the FBI got a warrant that gave it covert access to the anonymous email account," the BBC's Mark Ward reported.

Sources:

http://www.zdnet.com

http://finance.yahoo.com

http://actionamerica.org/echelon/echelonwhat.html

Information about TrapWire, a terrifying government surveillance program that's in the works

  http://werebuild.telecomix.org/wiki/Blue_cabinet/TRAPWIRE

 

 Background

"TrapWire Inc. was founded in 2004 to design, build and deploy counterterrorism technologies and services for the protection of critical infrastructure and personnel. The genesis of our company started with a project initiated in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. The objective of that project was to develop a capability that would prevent such attacks from occurring in the future. This project evolved into our flagship product, TrapWire, and its related methodologies and supporting capabilities.

As with all of our products and services, the TrapWire system encapsulates the expertise of professionals in the areas of counterterrorism, surveillance, surveillance detection, and intelligence operations and analysis. Prior to joining TrapWire, many of our employees were directly involved in the U.S. government’s war on terrorism as intelligence officers and members of the US Armed Forces and Secret Service. Our professionals have led successful intelligence operations against terrorist organizations and fought on battlefields across the globe. We view TrapWire as a continuation of our prior service, and as an opportunity to take a proactive stance against terrorism by helping law enforcement and private security agencies identify and disrupt attack planning processes, apprehend perpetrators, and prevent attacks." - Trapwire.com

Products

Integration
"The TrapWire system can be integrated with and can utilize most existing surveillance technologies (such as pan-tilt-zoom [PTZ] cameras) to capture photographic or video evidence of suspicious activity.
Additionally, SAR data captured in the TrapWire system can be easily transferred to other systems as needed via a standardized XML data file export. This is particularly helpful for Law Enforcement agencies who wish to upload their SAR data to the Information Sharing Environment (ISE), as well as eGuardian. TrapWire allows agencies to output records in the NIEM-compliant SAR-IEPD format. " - Trapwire.com